


Going From Here

by Orokiah



Category: Hex (TV)
Genre: F/M, Finally cross-posted from ff.net, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Romance, Soul-Searching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-07
Updated: 2010-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24772876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orokiah/pseuds/Orokiah
Summary: Holed up in the woods and struggling to work out what to do next, the End of Days starts to take its toll on Ella, Leon and Thelma.
Relationships: Ella Dee/Leon Taylor, Thelma Bates & Ella Dee, Thelma Bates & Ella Dee & Leon Taylor, Thelma Bates & Leon Taylor
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set straight after the end of season two.

It was the calm before the storm, the time when both sides, having declared war on each other, took a step back, laid down their arms, and let it sink in. It was a necessary period of adjustment. A time to accept the new reality, mourn for the old, and face the future, whatever it held, with a clear head and conscience.

The calm was still ongoing now, twelve short hours after the world had ended—at least as those who occupied it had come to know it. Twelve hours after Medenham Hall had been consumed by a demonic inferno, and Thelma, Leon and Ella had fled for their lives to a shaded woodland glade as far from the flames as the collective legs of a ghost, a mortal and an injured anointed one could carry them.

Only Thelma, so often the comic relief of the ragtag bunch, had realised the severity of the situation. Weakened from her self-inflicted stab wound, Ella had fallen asleep as soon as her feet had touched the leaf-strewn floor. Leon had eventually dozed off too, leaving Thelma watching over them, every inch the guardian angel she was dressed as. When Leon had woken up she'd been hoping for a serious talk about what the hell they did now, but he'd ignored her and just stared at Ella, cradling her hand in his and listening to her soft breaths as she slept.

Of course, once Ella had woken up too, Thelma and her attempts at making conversation were the last thing on their minds. They'd just sat there, snogging and giggling. So relieved to be alive and together that the small matter of Thelma getting a change of outfit, much less the world ending, didn't appear to bother them.

Now, at last, it seemed to have sunk in. The lovebirds had finally come up for air, and woken up to reality, and so they were doing what Thelma had been doing for the last twelve hours: sitting in silence as it dawned on them that this definitely wasn't a dream.

It was a nightmare—and they were living right through it.

"So I guess we lost, then," Thelma said at last, breaking the impasse, as she munched on a blade of grass in an attempt to relieve her hunger. She spat it out in disgust. "Bloody hell. We remember to bring the volta, the knife _and_ the book of Orokiah, but no one thought to grab a bite to eat on the way out?"

"We didn't exactly have time to raid the chocolate machine while we were running for our lives," Leon pointed out.

"We did _not_ lose," Ella snapped, ignoring the subject of food altogether.

"Oh really?"

"Malachi may have succeeded in bringing about the End of Days, but this war is far from over."

"It's all over bar the shouting," Thelma corrected, the lack of something more appetising to chew on making her even more irritable than the dire situation had so far managed. "I mean, poster boy for evil's got the school and God knows what else besides, and we're camping out in the woods like a bunch of girl guides."

"You wish," Leon said.

Thelma stuck her tongue out at him. "Let's face it, guys—we're screwed."

On that damning note she reached down and plucked a clump of grass from the forest floor, trying to work up the courage to stuff it in her mouth and pretend it was a really weedy sausage roll.

"'The clamour of Gods and men'," Leon said suddenly, gazing off into the distance as if he'd just remembered a quotation from one of Jo Watkins' old classes. Old as in before she'd turned evil, that was. He noticed Thelma and Ella glancing at each other, confused.

"What Thelma said, about the shouting—it reminded me of something."

"'Busty Biblical Babes'?" guessed Thelma.

"Something the guy in the pub said." He squinted against the hazy early morning light as he tried to remember it all. "I think it went something like, 'the sons of darkness will fight the sons of light, amid the roar of the multitude and the clamour of Gods and men'."

Ella stared at Leon. "When was this?"

"Right before he came back to school and saved your life," Thelma supplied, Leon having already filled her in on what he'd been up to when they'd arrived in the woods. Not without a superhuman effort on her part, though. Since he was far more interested in a sleeping Ella than he was in her attempts to extract information from him, their conversation had mostly consisted of Thelma firing questions and Leon grunting one-word answers back at her.

"And who was it who told you all this?"

"Not sure what his name is. He's the one who helped Thelma wake you up, when you were..."

"Mephistopheles," she said tersely, apparently not caring to recall her brief tenure as Malachi's succubus-slash-sex slave.

Thelma frowned. "So this helps us how?"

"Well, he also said that it didn't matter who won the war—that it wasn't going to solve anything."

"So...this helps us how?"

"I don't know, Thelma!" Leon shouted. He shrugged. "I just thought it might be useful."

"It is," Ella told him, all wifely reassurance. Thelma struggled to resist the urge to gag. She was pleased that it had worked out for them—when they weren't getting on her last nerve by snogging the faces off each other, that was—and the whole soulmate thing _was_ kind of cute. But sometimes, more than ever since the world had come to a crashing halt around them, it was just too much.

" _He_ might be useful. If we could track him down..."

"Hang on," Thelma interrupted, "he's one of the bad guys, remember?"

"He's fed up of both sides," Leon said. "He reckons they're both as bad as each other. He couldn't see the point in fighting when it wasn't going to solve anything—"

"Whoa, whoa. You keep saying that. What did he mean? How can it not solve anything?"

He thought about it. "Something about there being dark days ahead whoever wins."

Thelma felt her heart sink. "That's just bloody marvellous."

"But of course he'd tell you that," Ella said. "His side need to remove every obstacle if they hope to win this conflict. He was obviously sent ahead to discourage you from doing anything that might prevent that victory."

"Actually, he was trying to persuade me to come back to you."

She trailed the tip of a finger down his chest. "And I'm very glad he did."

"Why would he do that if he wasn't trying to help us?"

Ella didn't seem to have an answer to that, but the slight dent in her forehead suggested she was doing her best to think of one.

"Maybe he's Cupid in disguise," Thelma said, kicking her heels against the side of the rock she was perched on. Ella rolled her eyes condescendingly and didn't take up the suggestion.

"He's helped us twice now already," Leon persisted. "He might do it again."

"There's a big difference between helping us save you from an evil monster from hell and helping us kill Malachi," noted Thelma. She cocked her head to one side thoughtfully, fingers dancing a riff on her harp. "Though there _is_ a common theme in there somewhere..."

"Well, there's always Raphael."

Ella shook her head so violently she winced, lifting a hand to her barely-healed knife wound. "No."

Thelma glanced warily at her, recalling only too well her account of what had happened after she'd awoken from Malachi's influence and saved Leon from Sariel, the Nephilim assassin. Archangel Raphael had fallen from grace in a big way by practically trying to rape her.

Leon let out a long breath. "Ella, I'm so sorry..."

She kissed him full on the lips, accepting the apology.

"He's probably busy anyway," Thelma said with a glance up at the heavens, hidden from view by the canopy of trees. She'd seen enough of the two of them pawing each other to last a lifetime. Or in her case, afterlifetime.

"Anyway," Ella added with a sly smile, once she'd prised herself away from Leon again, "I kind of terminated my contract with his side the last time we saw each other."

"Great," Thelma said dryly. "So we don't work for the good guys, and the bad guys want to kill us. Where does that leave us exactly?"

"Stuck in the middle."

"Now you know how _I_ feel."

Leon shifted to his side and looked at Ella intently. "Mephistopheles is stuck in the middle, too. They tortured him for betraying them. You're not the only one who's unemployed. So to speak."

"No."

"But if we..."

"I said no, Leon!"

"Oh, I get it," Leon said as he let go of her hand for the first time since they'd arrived in the woods. "It's the Ella Dee show again. What the rest of us think doesn't matter."

She reached up and cupped his cheek. "It's not like that, Leon. It's just that I've got a lot more experience than you..."

Thelma snorted. "For which he's eternally grateful."

"Contacting Mephistopheles would be far too dangerous. _He_ is far too dangerous. It doesn't matter what he might have said or done. We can't trust him."

Thelma rested her chin in one hand. "So when an archangel tries to get off with you and Satan's sidekick helps rescue you, which one _are_ you supposed to trust?"

"You trust the only thing you have left," Ella said, lacing her fingers back through Leon's. "Each other."

Thelma nodded approvingly, pleased that Ella's near-death experience had taught her more than to trust in love. That was a worthy subject for an epiphany and all, but there were bigger things to consider. The last thing they needed right now was Ella deciding to go it alone to get her revenge. Assuming they stood any chance of defeating Malachi and his minions, it was a task they would never be able to complete unless they worked as a team. Though she had a sneaking suspicion that Ella's idea of teamwork at the moment involved her and Leon doing something horribly heterosexual, and that meant it was up to her to get things moving.

This _was_ a threesome, after all.

She abandoned the harp and jumped down from the rock. "Well, I for one don't need a side to know Malachi needs his arse kicking. Who's with me?"

Ella and Leon glanced at each other and back at Thelma. She lifted her eyebrows. They both raised their hands.

"Right then, Team Ella. Let's go back to Medenham—"

"Whatever's left of it," Leon whispered to Ella.

"—and zap the bastard." She put her hands on her hips as flourish. " _That'll_ teach him not to play with matches."

Leon guffawed, but Ella was shaking her head, expression grave.

"It's not going to be that easy," she cautioned. "Malachi will be almost impossible to kill now, and he'll be heavily guarded. It's going to take a bit of planning...a bit of thinking..."

"You said that last time, and look where it got us."

"It won't happen again," Ella promised, her eyes fizzing with determination and some other emotion Thelma couldn't quite read. She sat up straighter, apparently about to issue instructions of some kind, but then fell back, flinching. Leon hovered next to her protectively.

"Are you in a lot of pain?"

She smiled puckishly. "I'll live. Could someone pass me the book?"

Thelma darted over to the few, mostly mystical, possessions they'd brought with them and retrieved the thick tome.

"This," Ella said as Thelma placed it on her lap, "is why we don't need Mephistopheles, Raphael or any other higher being as our guide."

"An anointed one's guide to the galaxy," Leon quipped.

"Exactly. The book of Orokiah will tell us everything we need to know about the End of Days and what our next move should be." Ella paused, looking a little sheepish. "Without it, I'm afraid I don't know much about what to expect."

Leon grinned. "Sounds like you've been skipping classes for centuries."

"The End of Days...it's the subject of countless prophecies, much like Malachi...but the two were always connected. It was supposed to happen, and yet it wasn't...not as long as I fulfilled my destiny."

"Well, Miss Dee, your destiny's been interrupted," Thelma said as she settled herself down on the carpet of leaves. "Now tell us a story."

Ella thumbed the outer covers of the book reverently, as if she was welcoming an old friend, and then pulled them apart. As Thelma and Leon waited expectantly, her eyes widened. She thumbed frantically through the age-worn pages, her bottom lip trembling.

"What's wrong with it?" Leon asked, drawing himself up to his knees to take a look for himself. Thelma was quicker, though. Before two seconds had passed she was standing over Ella, staring down at the antique cream pages of the book. The sacred book. The book that was going to tell them where they went from here.

"Oh, fu—"

"It's blank!" Ella leafed back through the empty pages, her breath coming in short ragged gasps. "Everything—all the incantations—all the information—it's all gone!"

Leon stared over her shoulder. "How is that possible?"

"I don't know—it's never happened before—" She caught her breath and tried to regain her composure, pasting on a rigid smile. "I guess I've never decided to go freelance before, have I?"

"But the book was fine after that," Thelma pointed out. "It was where Leon found out he had to bleed you to death."

Leon shot her a look that could have killed. If she hadn't been dead already, that was.

"I don't understand," he said. "The book is just a book, isn't it? It's not like it's got a hotline to God or anything..." His voice trailed off as he saw Thelma and Ella exchanging a glance. "...has it?"

"It's a sacred book," Ella said grimly. "It's very much connected to God."

She slammed it shut telekinetically and tossed it as far away from her as she could manage. "I failed to kill Malachi, and then I failed to stop him from bringing about the End of Days. This is my punishment."

Thelma swapped a glance with Leon. "Ella, I don't think He's exactly got the time right now to pass judgement on you."

"Oh, on the contrary," Ella said. "He's _always_ got the time for it. That's the reason the Nephilim and their ilk hate him so much. They believe the world would be much more fun if they were in charge."

She glanced at the book of Orokiah bitterly. "Sometimes I'm almost inclined to agree with them."

Thelma frowned. "Not thinking of switching sides on us, are you?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Thelma," Leon snapped as Ella stared into space. She looked as pale and shaken as if she'd just been stabbed a second time. "We don't have a side, remember?"

"I'm just checking..."

He turned away and wrapped his arms around Ella, planting a comforting kiss on the top of her head. Thelma stood over them, cold creeping through her like an intravenous drip of ice.

_Fun_ was not the word she would use to describe a world run by Malachi. Having the smug, conniving bastard in charge of the school had been bad enough—what he'd get up to with the entire planet as his playground didn't bear thinking about. That Ella could even contemplate such an outcome would be fun, let alone say it out loud, disturbed her more than she could express.

But the book of Orokiah being fit for nothing more than doodling—well, if she and Leon found that hard to stomach, it had to be a shock of earth shattering proportions for Ella, who had relied on its guidance for the best part of five hundred years. It was bound to affect her. Today of all days, Thelma was willing to allow her a little leeway.

"How's your wound?" she asked evenly, gate crashing the party of two before they got so wrapped up in each other they forgot she was there. She could think of plenty of better things to ask. _What on earth are we supposed to do now_ , for instance. But without the book to provide the answer, the question hung unspoken in the air between them, as much of a ghost as Thelma was.

"I'm an anointed one," Ella reminded her. "I'm a fast healer."

"You'd heal even quicker if you had something inside you," Thelma said.

Leon rolled his eyes. "Do you think of nothing else?"

"Down, boy. _That_ is not what I meant."

"It's not what I meant either."

"Oh."

He sighed. "You're hungry, Thelma. We get it."

"Yeah, and I don't even _need_ to eat. Your girlfriend, on the other hand, could do with something to help her regain her strength. You too, Leon Taylor, because once we figure out what to do and get the hell out of here..."

"We don't know how long it's going to be before we get another chance," Leon finished.

"Actually...I was thinking more along the lines of, we don't know what's out there waiting for us." She sighed, trying to quash the feeling of rising panic. "Much less whether any of it's edible."

It was something none of them had dared to ponder aloud, but Thelma hadn't needed to intrude into their dreams to know it was on their minds too. What was left of the world outside of their temporary sanctuary? Even if Thelma had needed to sleep, there was little chance she would have been able to with the apocalyptic visions that kept popping into her head.

She could almost smell the acrid stench of churches burning, hear people screaming, feel the crunch of their ashes underneath her feet... She could see fire raining down from the blackened skies...a triumphant Malachi standing aloft the ashes of Medenham Hall, surveying his new kingdom...the Nephilim picking at the bones of their victims...

_Ew. I_ must _be hungry_.

With effort she shook herself out of the vivid image, keen to do something more constructive, and beckoned Leon over before Ella could get her hands on him again.

"Come on, lover boy. You and me are going hunting."


	2. Chapter 2

Ella fell into a fitful sleep after Thelma and Leon left, her fatigue born from more than just the need for the rest that would allow her to heal fully from her stab wound. It was a tiredness as much mental as it was physical. Almost five hundred years of hunting down Azazeal and his women, preventing the birth of the messiah of the fallen angels, and nothing had ever exhausted her so completely as six months as a school student.

Perhaps it was the never-ending battle she'd tired of, of holding back the inevitable all on her own. Malachi had said as much in Berlin: he was always going to be born. That meant the four hundred and forty five years of her life previous to that one, defining moment, had been wasted. It didn't matter how many times she'd succeeded in the past, or how she'd tried to gloss over her failure to emulate those successes in the here and now.

No amount of excuses about the reason she'd arrived at Medenham too late to stop Azazeal from finally siring his son could protect her from a truth that was as simple as it was unpalatable:

Ella Dee, last of the anointed ones, was a failure.

The previous day she'd been lying on her bed bleeding to death, weeping bitter tears over wasted opportunities. Her tears had been for Leon, and the time she'd wasted belittling him, pushing him away, scared because she could feel her defences dropping every time he got too close.

Their union didn't have the symmetry that had so enchanted her for a time with Malachi, whose destiny was inextricably linked with hers and yet so very different. Then there was the fact that she had five hundred years on his seventeen, and a whole heap of bloody baggage next to his clutch of GCSEs. But somehow none of it mattered. He completed her, and she needed him.

For someone who had spent half a millennium not needing anyone but herself, it was a pretty huge admission.

Today her mind, unable to rest completely while there was so much to think about, was racing over wasted opportunities of a different sort: the ones she'd had to kill Malachi but hadn't taken. The universe had presented her with those chances, over and over again, and she had wasted every last one of them. Some of them by default—Cassie taking the fatal blow meant for her son, Leon being unable to decapitate a sleeping Alex. Some of them by design. She had held the knife of Orokiah at Malachi's throat, and then given in to her own selfish desires, and walked away.

Perhaps it had been selfish, too, to spend her dying moments concerned only with Leon when there were so many other people in the world to consider. Yes, she was a killer, but her actions also preserved lives—countless more than the ones she was sworn to take. Thanks to her there were whole generations that had got the chance to continue their lives unimpeded, never knowing that there was a battle of biblical proportions being waged on their behalf.

This generation would not be so lucky.

Regenerating skin strained across the site of her knife wound as she tossed and turned against rough bark. She barely registered the accompanying stab of pain that jolted through her like a lightning bolt. Her mind was on other matters, on the question that lay beneath every thought she had had since her final attempt to kill Malachi had backfired so spectacularly. On why it was she had become such a failure—become so fallible. Become such a faltering shadow of her former self...

"Surely you know the answer to that by now," a voice said.

She struggled up an eyelid. "Leon..?"

"Oh, don't worry. We'll get to him later."

Ella's eyes snapped open. She found herself staring into another set of eyes, belonging to a figure crouched in front of her, shrouded in silhouette. As the figure stepped back into the light, she bolted upright, uncommonly terrified by what she saw in front of her.

It was _her_.

Although she didn't spend nearly as much time looking at herself in the mirror as Alex or Roxanne had—unless they'd been afflicted by an outbreak of biblical boils, anointed ones had no time for vanity—there was little doubt that, minus the mirror, that was exactly what she was doing. The woman standing in front of her had the same vibrantly red hair, the same dark rimmed brown eyes, the same pale skin.

Everything, down to the corset and the bloodstained blouse beneath it, was identical.

"A demon in my own image sent to snare me," she said scathingly, once she'd recovered the use of her voice. She slid one eye to the clearing ahead of her, calculating how quickly she could retrieve the volta. "How very— _creative_."

The other Ella laughed. "I'm not a demon."

"Then what? An archangel?"

"Oh, what an over inflated sense of your own greatness you have, Ella. Surely you don't believe yourself so important that a messenger must be sent to reverse your decision to sever your links with the heavens?"

"Of course not," Ella stuttered. It was somewhat disconcerting to be lectured by yourself. For the first time, she realised just how intimidating she could be.

"God is already amassing a vast army of light to do battle with the darkness," the other Ella continued. "What need would He have for a champion whose flesh is so weak that she wilfully defied her destiny, in favour of her own desires?"

The words drew a flicker of memory from the depths of Ella's brain. She drew herself up straighter, forcing herself to meet her double's unblinking gaze.

"Raphael."

"He told you your flesh was weak, too. And he was right, wasn't he?"

She held up a hand as Ella opened her mouth to protest, seemingly knowing what Ella was about to say and do before she did it. "Don't give me excuses. In no way do his sins compensate you for yours. You know that."

"I gave in to lust," Ella conceded, the stranger hitting her weak spots with such pinpoint accuracy that she felt a compulsion to answer its charges. "My—desire—for Malachi. It stopped me from killing him when I had the chance."

The double cocked her head to one side. "Hmm. So him taunting you about how you'd killed his mother in the exact same spot had nothing to do with it?"

"Well, a little, perhaps..." She stopped, annoyed with herself for getting drawn into it. "Does it really matter now?"

The double smirked at her from a safe distance. "Not to me."

"Who are you?" She felt her anger flaring. "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing more or less than you yourself desire. An understanding of your failings..." The doppelganger flicked back her curtain of red hair almost casually. "An admission of your culpability."

"Culpability for what?" Ella followed the double's gaze as she nodded over her head, back in the direction of Medenham Hall. Recognition dawned inside her.

"You rose from the depths of hell to hear me admit I'm to blame for the end of the world?"

"Then you do admit it."

Ella glared at the spectre in front of her, angered by its attempts to trap her into voicing the failures that had swirled so freely in the safety of her inner thoughts. Self-flagellation was one thing; admitting your mistakes was quite another. It was the first, most ancient rule of combat: do not allow the enemy to discover your weaknesses, for they are sure to use them against you.

The second, purge yourself of those weaknesses, was something she'd never quite mastered.

She opened her mouth to deny it. But the words she sought refused to obey. Others merrily trooped to her lips instead, ready to betray her secret thoughts, her secret shame.

"I—I'm to—I'm to blame."

She slumped back against the trunk of the tree, dazed, as the double continued her interrogation mercilessly, seemingly oblivious to her pain.

"You failed to kill Malachi."

"Yes."

"You failed to stop him from bringing about the End of Days."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Ella considered the question for a long moment. When she finally replied it was in calm, measured tones. She felt cool and detached, able to view what had happened and see where she'd gone wrong with crystal clarity.

"Because I squandered the best opportunity to kill Malachi I was ever going to get. Every event thereafter resulted from that one. He took me as his first succubus, making him realise the power he could exert, and with every other soul he took he grew more powerful until he was too strong to destroy. So yes...it's fair to say that the End of Days is my fault."

She looked to the ground, contrite. "The blame rests entirely with me."

"Fine words, Ella," her double said with a condescending smile. "If a little melodramatic."

She lifted her head. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? For me to admit it? To know why it happened?"

"Oh, you could go over the sequence of events until you were blue in the face, until the end of time if you wanted to, but you still wouldn't have answered my question."

"Now who's being melodramatic?"

The other Ella laughed. "Defensive, aren't you? It's a miracle _anyone's_ ever managed to penetrate that frosty veneer. Tunnel down to the frozen heart beneath it..."

She spun on a stiletto heel and started to pace back and forth, her hands clasped behind her back like a schoolteacher. Ella's eyes strayed to the double's feet, and she realised that although it was walking like a flesh and blood being, the motion disturbed none of the leaves underneath it. They remained as still as if there was nothing there.

"Don't you find it odd that no less than three men have managed to perform that miracle in the space of a year? And then there's Thelma, of course. That suggests to me that you actually wanted to let them all in. Literally, in some cases..."

The double abandoned her pacing and sat down next to Ella. "You know what else it suggests?"

"No," she said tersely. "But I'm sure you're going to enlighten me."

"Most likely it was a subconscious decision, but make no mistake, it was a decision. Why else would you have allowed yourself to be delayed on your way to what should have been a routine dispatch of another of Azazeal's conquests? Frivolous physical pleasure isn't that hard to come by in the twenty-first century. I believe it's called a one-night stand."

"Make your point," Ella snarled.

"It suggests that you were seeking to be something more than you were. _Human_ , Ella. You wanted to be human."

She leapt up, stung, the accusation hurting more than the sudden motion. "That's absurd!"

"So you _didn't_ want to be human?"

"Stop trying to put words in my mouth," Ella snapped. "Who are you to presume to tell me what it is I want, _demon_?"

"You wanted to know why you've become such a failure, didn't you?"

Ella frowned, feeling a little uncertain, as if the double had somehow managed to rummage around in her head and steal all her secrets.

"How do you know all these things?"

The double blithely ignored the question. "Oh, I know more than you think. I know the answers."

She felt her heart thumping. "Which are?"

"It's quite simple, Ella. You became a failure when you became more like a human being than an anointed one. When you allowed yourself to want things you can't have, to be things you can't be. Friend. Lover. Soulmate. Mother..."

Ella saw red. Ignoring all the signs that had told her the doppelganger wasn't real and therefore unable to interact physically with her, much like Thelma, she sprang forward, hands outstretched like claws. With a growl she landed on the double, knocking her to the ground, and pinned her there by the wrists. To her surprise, they were as warm and as solid as her own.

"I can touch you," she said, caught off guard by the discovery. It was the ideal moment for the double to get the upper hand in their battle, but she just lay there inertly on the ground, grinning.

"If you insist." She stared lasciviously up at Ella, sitting on top of her. "Thelma would have an embolism if she saw this."

"I doubt that. Redheads aren't her type."

"But it's everyone's favourite fantasy, isn't it? If only they'd admit it. The last great taboo. Doing it with your favourite person in the whole wide world. After all, who can possibly understand you better than...yourself?"

Ella felt her grasp on the wrists loosen. She sank back, staring into the double's eyes. Her own eyes. The other Ella began to chuckle to herself, the sound echoing loudly in the silence of the empty woods.


	3. Chapter 3

"I bet you didn't think this was how you'd be spending your summer," Thelma remarked to Leon as they strolled through the trees, each of them brandishing a branch they'd collected en route and sharpened to a point.

"I was thinking of going to Ibiza," recalled Leon, a touch of nostalgia in his voice.

"This is pre-Ella, I assume."

"Yeah, well, somehow I don't think fun in the sun is quite her thing."

"Hoping you might get laid, were you?"

He shrugged aimlessly, not bothering to deny it.

"Well, that's one way of losing your cherry, I suppose."

Leon shot her a glare. "Thelma!"

"Don't 'Thelma' me. As if it was such a deep dark secret. You'd have been better off going to Soho and just paying for it, you know. Probably would have got shut of it sooner. People go to Ibiza for the clubs, not the sex."

"And what did you think you'd be doing? Package holiday to the isle of Lesbos?"

"Oh, like I haven't heard that one before." Thelma trailed her branch along the ground, a studied sort of casual. "Actually, I was planning on doing something with Cassie."

"Pre-the whole ghost thing."

"And after. She was a witch, remember, like Ella. She could see and hear me as clearly as you can." She stopped, stabbing the branch into the ground, feeling hot tears prick at her eyes as she imagined what it would have been like.

"Probably would have really pissed her off, me haunting her at home as well as at school. Or wherever she would have gone...other relatives, maybe. You know her mum was a mental patient?"

He nodded.

"It didn't matter where she went, though. I just wanted to be with her."

What Leon made of this confession, Thelma wasn't sure. She found herself avoiding looking at him, feeling embarrassed at baring her soul to him, not really sure why she had. Maybe the End of Days was like PMT for ghosts or something. She'd never been much of a deep thinker, always preferring to let her mouth do the talking, but suddenly she couldn't _stop_ thinking—what had come before, what was likely to come after, what might have been.

It was making her head hurt. Not to mention turning her into a emotional wreck.

"But instead I'm stuck here with nothing else to do but watch you and Ella slobber over each other every second of the day."

She grinned as she watched Leon getting to grips with the image, cheered up hugely by the look of abject horror on his face. Thelma Bates, the peeping phantom. If that didn't put them off, nothing would. It was better than a bucket of cold water.

"Oops, sorry—haven't dampened your rampant libido, have I?"

Leon made a face at her as she retrieved her branch and they continued walking.

"Don't worry, Thelma. There's bound to be a hot lesbian ghost out there somewhere you can get your own rocks off with."

"There already was..." She sighed, feeling a pang of regret. It still hurt to think of Maya's raven locks and sweet Irish accent. More than that, it hurt to think how Malachi had tainted their short time together. He'd killed Maya on a whim so he could use her as a tool to manipulate Thelma, and it had worked exactly as he'd planned. Thelma had betrayed Ella and Leon on more than one occasion in the hopes of salvaging her last chance to find happiness. But it had all been for nothing. Malachi was still wreaking havoc on the world, and Maya was gone forever, caught in the crossfire.

Just like Cassie.

"Ella killed her," she finished, not entirely sure which of the women she'd loved and lost she was referring to.

"You'll just have to turn straight then."

"Hey, I might be dead but I'm not that desperate."

Leon whirled around suddenly and impaled a nearby bunch of leaves that were rustling gently. Thelma peered over his shoulder as he removed the stick from the ground, but there was nothing stuck on the end of it except a clump of soil. He shook it off, frustrated.

"Thelma, this is hopeless!"

"There's got to be something we can kill."

"There's nothing alive in these woods," Leon protested. He gestured around them. "We've been out here for hours. Have you seen or heard anything?"

"Just you and your big mouth."

He ignored the jibe. "Usually in the woods you get those weird flying insect things—"

"Ooh, thunderbugs—I hate them."

"No insects. No animals. Not even any birds singing. There's nothing here except us. It's like we're in the twilight zone or something."

"Leon, you're starting to creep me out."

"This is starting to creep me out," Leon said. He took his branch and flung it away from him with a grunt of effort. It flew across the clearing and hit a tree before sliding uselessly to the ground.

Thelma tutted. "What was the point of that? Now we'll have to go and fetch it."

"We'll get another one."

"No way. My teeth are still hurting from sharpening that thing..."

She tucked her own stick between her wings and trotted off in determined pursuit of Leon's. He trudged after her despondently.

"Hey, come on, Leon. It'll be okay."

"The world as we know it has gone up in smoke, Thelma. How can that possibly be okay?"

"You got back with Ella?" she offered hopefully.

"Yeah, I know, but..." He sighed. "It's just weird, you know—this End of Days thing. We've got no idea what it really means, or what's going to happen."

"My guess," Thelma said, "is that at some point there's going to be a bloody big battle."

"You're not helping."

"Well, I don't know what to expect any more than you or Ella do! I've never lived through the apocalypse before, have I?"

"Is that really what this is?"

Thelma softened a little, seeing fear on his face. He'd grown up so much recently that sometimes she forgot he'd once been a normal, obnoxious teenager with nothing more to worry about than raging hormones and a non-existent sex life. Hell, sometimes she forgot that she'd once been that too—taking out the obnoxious bit, of course. But now school was out for the summer, and she was dead, and he was in love with a five hundred year old witch.

Sometimes weird just didn't cut it.

"Try to look on the bright side. At least you won't have to take your A Levels now."

He grinned. "True."

"And you don't have to be worried that being with Ella is keeping you from leading a normal life. No such thing as normal anymore."

He looked at her seriously. "I've never worried about that."

"I know, but she has... It's different for her, Leon. It was her world you were getting involved in—her fight."

"Well, now it's mine. Ours," he amended.

Thelma frowned. "There was me thinking we wouldn't be doing any fighting. Since we don't have a side and all."

He looked a little confused at that, but didn't question it. "We can't just sit in the woods and do nothing."

"Speak for yourself, mister. I've got all of eternity to wait here and see who kicks whose butt in this battle."

Leon rolled his eyes, apparently thinking she was joking.

"Malachi's not going to come looking for me. And he probably thinks Ella's dead. He sent you—all right, evil you—to kill her; it's not as if he ever came to check you'd done it. He's not going to wonder where you are, either. He probably didn't even notice when we cut you loose, he's got that many other souls to suck..."

"There are just so many things wrong with that image," Leon muttered.

"You said it yourself," Thelma continued, a desperation she hadn't realised she felt rising with every word, "it's not going to make any difference who wins. If that's true, there's no point in us getting our hands dirty, is there?"

He looked at her sceptically. "What do you suggest we do instead?"

"Find somewhere to hide out until all this is over. Preferably somewhere with a well-stocked fridge."

"You're not serious."

"Well, why not?" She stared him out for a second and then looked down, wringing her hands. "I feel like we're in limbo right now, Leon, and I know we can't go back but I'm not sure I want to go forward, either. We might not know what's out there waiting for us, but I know this much—it's nothing good. And if nothing good's ever going to come out of this war, then I don't see much point in fighting it. What would we be fighting for?"

He opened his mouth to reply, but she didn't wait for the answer and bent down to retrieve the stick instead. But by the time she'd picked it up and turned around again, he still hadn't spoken. He was staring at the tree ahead of them, his mouth still hanging half-open.

"Thelma, why are there funny marks on the trees?"

"I think they do orienteering round here. The scouts used to camp out in these woods every summer." She held the stick out to him with one hand on her hip. "You didn't answer my question."

"Not those kinds of marks. Look—it's like someone's scratched some kind of symbol into the bark."

Thelma turned around and squinted at the tree, which was etched with deep furrows in the shape of an elongated Z. "Oh yeah..."

"Some of the other trees we passed were the same," Leon said as he went closer, intrigued. "Didn't you notice?"

She shrugged but followed him to get a better look. "People are always scratching things into trees."

"Not like this they're not."

They stared at the odd etching in silence for a second.

"I wonder what it means," Leon said. He lifted a finger as if to trace the sinister looking outline, to Thelma's alarm. She smacked the branch she was holding down on his arm and he pulled back instantly, grimacing.

"Jesus, Thelma!"

She folded her arms, unrepentant. "Didn't your mother ever teach you to look and not to touch?"

"We can't just ignore it. It might be important."

"For God's sake, Leon! For all we know it's something to do with this end of the world thing, some mystical mortal zapper that'll copy your DNA and then kill you dead!"

He raised an eyebrow. "Thelma, you're overreacting."

"Or maybe it's a deadly fungal disease. Do _you_ know? No! You don't!"

He stepped back from the tree, his eyes blazing.

"Well, at least I'm taking an interest."

"No, you're trying to get yourself killed. Great idea, Leon. Almost as great as that other one you had. You know, the one about contacting Mephistopheles so he can hand our heads to Malachi on a silver platter..."

He snatched the branch off her. "I don't see you coming up with any better ideas."

"What would be the point? According to you, what we do doesn't matter anyway because the outcome of this End of Days crap is already predetermined."

"According to Mephistopheles," Leon corrected.

She scowled. "Whatever."

"And he didn't say it was predetermined. He said there were dark days ahead whichever side won."

"Oh, well, that's all right then, isn't it!"

He sighed and pushed his hair back from his eyes. "Thelma, this morning you were itching for us to go back to Medenham and do Malachi in. I don't understand what's changed."

"Well, for starters, the bloody book decided to desert us, didn't it?"

"That doesn't mean we should sit around doing sod all for the rest of time."

"Plus we're stuck out here with no idea what's going on outside, absolutely no idea what to do next, and not a sausage to eat. Quite literally... And I'm scared, okay? I'm _scared_."

The word reverberated around the thicket of trees for a long moment.

"You're a ghost," Leon said eventually. "It's not like you're going to die."

"You might. So might Ella, if someone hits the right vein." She paused, swallowing hard, trying to make him understand. "Everyone I love has left me. I don't want to lose the two of you as well. And if we get involved in this, there's a very good chance I will."

He stared at her, hard. She flashed him a half-smile.

"I might not want to shag you, but it doesn't mean I don't care."

Leon grinned playfully. "Thelma, I'm touched."

"Actually, I think that's Ella's job."

"Look," he said, choosing his words with care, "I don't like this any more than you do. But we're involved in it, whether we want to be or not."

She sighed, still struggling with it. "I guess so."

"And like I said. This is our fight now, too. It's not just about Ella, or about Malachi, or any of that warriors of destiny crap. The whole world's at stake. I've got family out there, friends, and I want a say in what happens to them. I mean, Tom died because of this shit..."

His voice trailed off, leaving the details unspoken: that it was him who'd killed Tom, beheading him after being duped by Malachi into believing he'd joined the ranks of his incubi. Yesterday he'd lashed out at Ella for it, blaming her for making him feel so inadequate that he was prepared to murder his best friend to prove he was worthy of her love. Today, Thelma wasn't sure if his reticence was down to the fact that it was too painful to talk about, or because there was simply no point in going over it.

"Even if us doing something doesn't make a difference," Leon said quietly, "it'll make a difference to us—because at least we'll have tried. Don't you get that?"

"I suppose."

"Doing nothing isn't an option anymore."

"Which kind of begs the question—what other options are there?"

He thought about it for a second. "Well, it all comes back to Malachi, right?"

"Right."

"Then we need to find a way of getting to him."

Thelma shrugged. "Same way as you get to any evil dictator."

"Bomb him into submission?"

"Cut off the source of his power."

Leon twirled the branch idly, maintaining a deliberate silence. Thelma got the distinct impression that she'd fallen straight into some kind of trap.

"Oh, come off it, Leon. I can't go into their dreams and unplug all his groupies. I might have forever, but I don't have _that_ long."

"But Malachi works by exploiting people's deepest desires, doesn't he?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"Then maybe we need to figure out what his deepest desire is. If granting everyone else's desires brings them under his control, then maybe—"

"We can do the same to him." She grinned, loving the idea of Malachi having his own strings pulled for a change; imagining the possibilities. But the smile faded away as quickly as it had appeared.

"It'll never work, though."

"Why not?"

"He's bound to have protected himself against something like that. A spell, maybe, or some kind of potion. There's no way he'd want me poking around in his grubby little head, even if I could get close enough to do it."

She folded her arms. "Next."

"How does mass murder grab you?"

Thelma didn't like the sound of that. Leon had never been exactly chopper happy; Ella might have been wielding the axe with abandon around Medenham, but for him it was strictly a spectator sport.

Until Tom.

A shiver ran down her spine as she wondered if it wouldn't have been better for him to fall apart than to get all gung-ho about it. It occurred to her suddenly that maybe it wasn't all it seemed. Maybe this was just his way of dealing with it, or more likely with the poisonous prospect of having to kill again. He was putting it out there so she would tell him her opinion of it without ever once straying onto the messy subject of how he felt about it. It really was so very _male_.

She didn't want to give him false hope. Slaughtering enough of Malachi's followers so he was weak enough to kill was not going to be easy, in more ways than one.

"The three of us against hundreds of soulless zombies?" she said. "A, those aren't good odds, and B, I'm assuming you've never seen 'Night of the Living Dead'?

Leon raised an eyebrow at her. She rolled her eyes, offended.

"Oh, please. I'm dead, not undead. Admit it, Leon. You're just clutching at straws here."

"Well, you wanted options," Leon reminded her, not looking discouraged. "You might not like any of them, but that doesn't mean we don't have them."

Feeling a ray of hope break through the gloom for the first time, Thelma narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at him. "Ella was right. You _are_ clever."

He beamed. "She said that?"

"She was bleeding to death at the time. I wouldn't read too much into it."

He nodded agreeably, but the smile that still tugged on the edge of his lips made it clear the comment meant more to him than he was admitting. Being Ella's equal had been such a big deal to him. Annoyed by the constant kissing as she was, it had warmed even Thelma's cynical heart when Ella had finally got down off her high horse and accepted him as such. Even if it had taken the threat of dying to make her do it.

She was on the point of making a smart remark about how the shift in the balance of power between them was going to affect their sex life when something caught her eye.

"Oh my God, Leon!"

He followed her gaze down to his shoes, the toes of which were stained with bright red blots. As they watched another droplet landed, spreading another scarlet spiral across the scuffed white leather.

Frowning, Leon put a hand to his head to feel for the mysterious injury.

"If I don't get you back in one piece, Ella's going to kill me," Thelma said, anxiously stuffing her knuckles into her mouth. She removed them again, to quell the urge to chew on them. "Well, you know what I mean."

"I haven't cut myself," Leon said, confused, as he finished patting himself.

"You must have. It can't be me, and it's not like it's..." She glanced overhead, almost too scared to look. "...raining blood."

She squeezed her eyes shut as the fear came flooding back, trying to keep it all out, praying that her apocalyptic imaginings weren't about to come true. Until she remembered how unlikely it was there was anyone listening to her prayers at the moment—and until she heard Leon's voice.

"It's not raining," he said grimly. "It's the trees. They're what's bleeding."

Thelma opened her eyes through outstretched fingers and watched as the blood oozed out through the symbol scratched on the bark of the tree in front of them. Leon stepped backwards, trying to make it look casual, but quickly abandoned the pretence. He shook the offending foot frantically, screwing up his face in disgust.

"It's like they're hurt," Thelma realised, both repulsed and fascinated.

"Is that possible?"

"It's the End of Days. Anything's possible."

"A book that unwrites itself is one thing," Leon said as he removed his shoe and wiped it on the grass, "but trees that bleed? That's just not natural."

"No, it's not," Thelma agreed. Suddenly the quip she'd been about to make about Leon and Ella's relationship, about how the balance of power between them had shifted, rose again in her mind. And when she remembered something else, something Peggy Launceston, full-time Egyptologist and part-time Medenham ghost, had said to her, realisation dawned.

"It's unnatural, Leon. Of course! It makes perfect sense!"

He frowned as he slipped the shoe back on. "It does?"

"Don't you see? The natural order was already disrupted—that's why I'm here. Now Malachi's destroyed it completely. There's no balance anymore, not between natural and unnatural, between good and evil, between anything. And they don't want there to be."

Leon looked around uneasily, as if the ground was going to open up and swallow them any second.

"Hearts and minds of men my arse," Thelma scoffed. "The greedy bastards want more than that. They want the lot—and this war is not going to stop until one of them gets it."

"So...everything's all up for grabs?"

"Everything and everyone. I mean, for God's sake, they're even fighting over the trees..."

On any other day it might have been funny. But as they stared at the tree in front of them, still dripping eerily, in a way nature had never intended it to, Thelma had never felt less like laughing.

"First blood," she said softly.

"To Malachi's side, I suppose."

"What makes you say that?"

"It's obvious. He was the one who started all this, wasn't he?"

"Yeah," Thelma recalled tactlessly, "he always was good at scoring."

Leon shuffled his feet. "We should get back to Ella."

"Aww. You really can't bear to be parted from her, can you?"

"Well, we haven't found what we came looking for, and if the trees are anything to go by, I'm not sure I want to."

"Me either," Thelma agreed, idly imagining them being chased through the woods by a giant squirrel with big sharp teeth. Or maybe something really frightening, like a wild boar that was looking for the ghost who'd eaten all its relatives. She swallowed nervously. "I really don't want to be someone else's dinner."

Leon frowned at her. "Eh?"

"So," Thelma said, cursing her overactive imagination, "I guess we'll just have to figure out what to do next on empty stomachs."

Plucking her unused spear out from between her wings, she looked at it mournfully, fondly imagining what might have been impaled on it and then roasted on the fire ready for her consumption. Some kind of rodent, perhaps. They did say everything tasted of chicken, after all, and that would have been the next best thing to pork...

"Which way is it then?"

"Back the way we came."

Thelma turned around and peered at the cluster of trees ahead of them, stretching into the distance as far as she could see. "I don't know, Leon. It all looks the same to me."

"Don't worry," he said. "I know exactly where we're going."

"Let's hope so," Thelma muttered as Leon strode ahead of her, full of confidence. She tossed her branch into the dense foliage and followed, her fingers firmly crossed that there would be no ghost-eating pigs lying in wait for her.


	4. Chapter 4

"So which part of me are you?" Ella asked, her curiosity piqued. She released the double from her grasp and stood up to scrutinise her. "My ego? My conscience? My guilty conscience, maybe?"

"I'm the little voice inside your head you never listen to," the double said, rising from the mud to face her.

"The voice of reason, I suppose."

"Precisely. You have no idea how frustrating living with you can be. I give you suggestions, but you ignore them. I provide you with certainty, but you prefer to live in doubt. I whisper the answers to all your questions, but you choose not to hear me."

"Ah," Ella said, not believing an over-elaborate word of it. "And now you want to make me listen."

"Believe me, if ever there was a time you needed to, it's now."

She laughed scornfully. "Why? So you can lie to me?"

"I'm not asking you any questions you haven't already asked yourself. I just happen to be asking them out loud."

"Spare me," Ella muttered.

"I have nothing to tell you that you don't already know, Ella."

"Oh, I think I'd know if my deepest darkest desire was to be human."

"Like you knew Leon was your perfect fit?"

The double smiled, seeing Ella stunned into silence. "Deep inside, you always knew it. You just didn't want to accept it. The last of the great anointed ones giving away her heart and soul to a mere mortal? What would your father say?"

"He'd want me to be happy," Ella insisted.

"He'd want you to fulfil your destiny."

She lifted her chin imperiously. "I fail to see why the two have to be mutually exclusive."

The double tutted in disapproval.

"I _need_ him..."

"You managed perfectly well without him for five hundred years."

"Yes," Ella agreed. "But that's all I was doing. I wasn't living—I wasn't _feeling—_ "

"And what are you feeling now?" The double smirked. "Apart from Leon, that is."

Ella rolled her eyes. "I'm not sure I believe any part of me enjoys making smutty jokes as much as you do."

"You do have a sense of humour, you know. But you've spent so long being so deadly serious about everything that you've forgotten how to use it."

"What I do is not a laughing matter," Ella snapped as the double began to laugh. She wasn't sure if it was to taunt her or because it was genuinely amused by something.

"You see," the double said between giggles, "that was an excellent pun, and you missed it entirely."

Ella frowned, baffled. "What pun?"

The double snapped out of the hilarity like a switch had been flicked inside it. "Never mind. Just answer the question."

"About how I'm feeling?" She considered it for a second. "Let's see...tired. Kind of sore..."

" _Proper_ feelings."

She thought of Leon: and there was an awful lot to think about. The maturity he'd shown in getting to grips with her world, his eagerness to help her, his determination to break down her barriers. His forgiveness when she'd betrayed him with Malachi; all the times he'd saved her life. She wasn't exactly unappreciative of his body or the touch of his lips, either. There was so much to say, so much to feel—and yet it all boiled down into one single word.

One that, handily, Ella had just remembered the meaning of.

"Love," she said, enjoying the way it resonated with such certainty.

"What else?"

She thought of Thelma: and smiled, picturing her in her angel outfit. Thelma had been her ally—her friend—long before she'd given it a name. But it was far harder to describe how she felt about her than it was to describe how she felt about Leon. Saying that it was nice to have someone to talk to didn't really seem to cover it. She liked her; respected her tenacity. Felt affection for her, even. Perhaps that was also love, in its way.

"I suppose...I suppose friendship."

"Anything else?"

This was safer ground, and she retreated to it with ease. "Relief."

"That you're still alive."

Ella nodded. The double shook her head slowly. "Do you think the rest of the world is so relieved?"

"My death wouldn't have changed what's happened," Ella retorted, prepared for the question. She'd already decided that she wasn't about to let this demon wearing her own face to wrong-foot her again.

"You're just skimming the surface again, Ella. Your feelings are far more complex than you pretend."

"Since you so enjoy telling me how it is I feel," Ella said, sitting back down as the exertion of the confrontation finally got the better of her, "why don't you fill in the gaps?"

The double's eyes lit up, needing no further prompting.

"Contempt. Pity."

"For Malachi."

"For yourself. Along with a healthy dose of guilt, disillusionment and doubt. Oh, and resentment, too. An enormous amount of resentment."

The double sat down with a smile, a childish sense of glee palpable as she watched Ella's face fall.

"You already know I blame myself for the End of Days," Ella said eventually. "Do we have to keep going over it?"

"We'll keep going over it until you find some sort of resolution."

"How can I?" She rested her head against the tree, wanting to cry but determined not to give her inquisitor the satisfaction. Looking up towards the sky, she willed the unshed tears to drain back down to wherever it was they were springing from.

"It was my responsibility to stop him, and I failed. So many people are going to die—and it's all because of me."

"People have already died because of you," the double observed.

"It's not the same."

"You feel guilty about it, though."

"They shouldn't have become involved with Azazeal in the first place," Ella shot back.

"You can't help who you fall in love with."

She smiled ruefully. "No, you can't. But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit here and debate the morality of my actions with you. I believe in everything I did—everything. It may not have been right, and I may have some regrets about having to do it, but guilty? No."

"Cassie," the double said suddenly.

"What about her?"

" _That's_ where the guilt comes."

"That was different."

"Why? Because you happened to know her name?"

Ella sighed, her thoughts straying to that fateful night in the church. "Because she wasn't the one I was trying to kill."

"An accidental death. Shouldn't that have made it easier?"

"Harder," Ella insisted. "It was Malachi who was supposed to die, not her."

"But surely you would have had to kill her eventually. Azazeal could easily have come back for more."

"I could have protected her from him."

"It seems to me," the double said, raising an eyebrow, "that it wasn't really him she needed protecting from."

Ella shook her head, trying to shake off the image of Cassie throwing herself in the path of the knife. "She wasn't supposed to die. But when she did, I saw the effect it had on the people—person—who cared about her the most. That was the first time I'd ever seen the consequences of my intervention. Thelma was so upset—she was just so bereft—"

"It's more than that, though."

"I don't blame myself for it, if that's what you mean. Cassie chose to sacrifice herself. There was nothing I could have done to prevent that."

"You were confused by it," the double persisted.

Ella frowned, suspicious of where the conversation might be leading. "Of course I was—no one else I've killed has ever offered themselves up quite so willingly."

The other Ella leaned forward. "That's because you've never tried to kill a child in front of his mother's eyes before."

"Oh, _now_ I see where you're going with this," Ella said, after a careful pause. "This is connected to the me-secretly-wanting-to-be-human idea, isn't it?"

The double didn't answer. Instead, she carefully wound a strand of her red hair around one pale finger. She held it up to the light and watched it glint in the sunlight. She ignored Ella completely, a tactic that always enraged her, and, of course, one that worked perfectly.

"Cassie sacrificed herself for her son, I was confused by it, and that automatically ties into your ridiculous fancies about my desire to be _human_. For heaven's sake: of course I was confused! How could I even begin to understand something my destiny seeks to deny me? It's not—"

She stopped abruptly, cheeks flushing hot. The double looked up, impassive.

"What an interesting school of thought part of me subscribes to," Ella said, reflecting on it for a moment. She thought back to the night of her birthday, the accusation she'd flung so tearfully at a bewildered Leon. _You're acting like we're going to settle down and have kids._

It only occurred to her now that he'd never come close to doing anything of the kind. He'd been drunk enough to declare his love for her, brave enough to admit in front of his friends that he wanted to be with her and only her forever, and she'd taken it and twisted it into something else entirely.

The double slid the ringlet of hair off her finger and watched it uncurl. "Very interesting."

"Very _Elizabethan_. My mother would be so happy to know my biological destiny is as important to me as my magical one."

"You misunderstand," the other Ella said. "I'm not suggesting you're secretly yearning to be a mother. But that doesn't mean you haven't wondered what it would be like. That's only natural. It's a part of the normal life you've begun to crave, after all."

"Perhaps. But that's not the same thing as wanting to be human."

"So you admit it's true if I say you want to be normal, but not if I say you want to be human?"

"I suppose so," she said, suspecting another trap was being laid for her.

The double shook her head condescendingly. "You're playing with semantics. What you want isn't what's normal for a slug, or a bird of prey. It's what's normal for a human. A normal life, a human life: they're one and the same. And yet you object so strongly to me using the word _human_."

"Yes," Ella spat. "I object."

"Normal...human..." the double said with a shrug, turning over her palms as if she was weighing the words up with scales. "I don't suppose it really matters. Just as long as you accept it was your desire to be one, or both, or either, that led you to this."

Ella listened with a heavy heart. "The reason I failed."

"Yes."

"Fine. I accept it."

"No, you don't."

"Can we talk about something else now?"

The double shrugged easily. "If you'd prefer."

"Why exactly are you here?"

"Because you're in pain."

Ella prodded her stab wound experimentally, the crusted bloodstain on her blouse crinkling under the onslaught. "Not especially."

"Not that kind of pain." The double tapped at her forehead. "In here. You're conflicted—in two minds—"

She laughed. "Tell me about it."

"How can you consider where you go from here when you haven't yet come to terms with what's gone before?"

"I don't have time to navel-gaze," Ella growled.

"But fate has given you the time, for a reason: a very good reason. A war approaches, Ella, and if you hope to survive it you need to be more sure of yourself than you've ever been before. It's time to dispel all these doubts, all this indecision..."

"Most of which has been caused by you!"

"By you," the other Ella corrected. "I am simply a projection of it."

"But..." She frowned, trying to work it all out. "I dared to want something more than being alone, with nothing ahead of me apart from the next kill, and you said it was what made me a failure. The reason I couldn't stop Malachi from bringing about the End of Days. Does that mean...that's what I think, too?"

"Part of you," the double confirmed.

"And what else is that part of me thinking?"

"That the world will have to pay a great price for your refusal to remain what you were born to be. That you need to make amends for what you've done. That you need to make a sacrifice...to suffer as those who will reap the consequences of your inaction will do."

Ella wiped absently at her arms, still smeared with soil from the tussle with her twin. She glanced down at them, and gasped. As she lifted her hands, shaking, blood dripped from them. So much blood that she could no longer see her own skin. The blood of all her victims: past, present and future.

She screwed her eyes shut, knowing it wasn't real, just another projection of her mixed-up mind. But at the same time she knew there was only one thing she could do to make it better.

"I have to give him up," she whispered, hearing the siren call inside her. It was the oddest thing, but now she'd finally stopped suppressing it, she realised it was not her own voice, but her father's.

Unexpectedly, the double leapt over to her. "No."

She opened her eyes again, resigned to it. "Yes."

"It's what part of you thinks you should do, Ella. That doesn't mean it's what you want."

"It's _not_ what I want," she said, a tear trickling down her cheek as she tried to ignore the insistent demand for atonement.

"Then what is?"

She wiped a hand across her eyes, forcing the pieces together with the iron will that had got her through five hundred years of solitary slaying.

"I want to stop Malachi. But I don't want to do it on my own. I don't care whether that's selfish, or whether my father would have approved. I want Leon, and dammit, I _deserve_ him."

"Feisty Ella," the doppelganger said approvingly. "I wondered when you were going to find your way back to us."

"I bear some responsibility for the End of Days," she added. "I can't deny that. But it wasn't me who brought it about. It's Malachi who needs to pay the price for what he's done—not me."

The other Ella smiled triumphantly.

"I don't want to be human, though," Ella said quickly.

"But what else will you be?"

"Excuse me?"

"You remain at this age for a specific purpose. Once that purpose is fulfilled, there will no longer be any need for you to remain this way. Are you trying to tell me you'll drop dead the instant your destiny no longer exists?"

"I've never thought about it," she lied, but quickly realised it was pointless to deny it. "I suppose I'll be...mortal."

"Human."

Ella let her thoughts trail off for a moment, to the place she'd visited fleetingly throughout her long life, more often still since Leon had entered it. Imagining what it would be like: growing old with someone, feeling safe in their arms, feeling loved. It was a thrilling whisper, a hopeful promise that someday she might achieve it. That she might actually be...

"Mortal," she said firmly, then smiled, channelling Thelma. "With kick ass powers."

"You're not ready," the double said, sounding disappointed. "No matter. After all, there is every chance you will never fulfil your destiny."

"Not now," Ella agreed, resigned to it, thinking of the titanic battle that was about to begin, and how hopelessly outnumbered she, Thelma and Leon were, "no."

"But your destiny will be fulfilled if you kill Malachi?"

"In part," she said warily.

"Then how can you hope to achieve it if you don't participate in this war?"

"But how _can_ I?"

The double regarded her thoughtfully. "You're afraid."

"Afraid to fail again?" Ella offered, anticipating the rest.

"No. Afraid of the unknown."

"Isn't everyone?" She drew her knees to her and rested her head on them for a moment. "Malachi is most likely indestructible by now, and without the book of Orokiah, I don't know what it is I'm supposed to do to get around that. It's not as if I have anyone to issue me with step by step instructions anymore."

"But you never did have. You've always worked alone."

"And when I _do_ need someone to tell me what to do," Ella said, "there's no one there."

"Ah. Hence the resentment."

She lifted her head and glanced at the book, lying discarded in the soil. "Leon and Thelma are relying on me to tell them what to do, and for the first time in my life, I don't have the faintest idea what that should be. I've spent five hundred years obeying them and their stupid rules—" She pointed up at the heavens for emphasis. "—and now they've abandoned me."

"Some would say it was the other way around."

"Wiping the book was a pointless, petty act," Ella insisted. "The information in it is of no use to them, but it's all I've got."

"Is it?" The double stared at her. "All you've got?"

"Well, there's Leon, and Thelma..."

"Maybe you should try listening to them," the double suggested.

Ella laughed. "They don't know anything about the End of Days."

"Neither do you."

She frowned, taking this in, as the double stood up and went over to the book. She picked it up with as little effort as if she was lifting a feather and tossed it on the ground next to Ella. Seating herself again, she opened the front cover. Ella recoiled, the sight of the empty pages hitting her like a speeding bullet.

"I know it hurts," the double said, sounding sympathetic. Her attitude seemed to have changed since Ella had stopped prevaricating quite so much. She was less brittle, kinder; more at ease, somehow. Ella wondered if it was a reflection of how she had changed, too. She was far from the hard ass demon hunter she'd been when she'd arrived at Medenham. Leon, Thelma, Malachi, Cassie: they'd changed her, all of them.

"It's more than that," she said. She caressed the side of the book with her hand, her mind drifting back across the centuries. "I've learned so much from this book. But it's not just a repository of knowledge. It's also a link to my past, a source of strength—it reminds me of who I am."

"Who you were," the double corrected. "You're more than that now. And you're in a whole new world, one where the old rules don't apply. What makes you think there was anything in this book that could have helped you?"

"There's _always_ something in the book."

"You're right," the double declared. "There is."

Ella leaned forward, her heart filling with hope. "But it's blank," she said, feeling a crushing disappointment.

"You're not looking properly."

She stared at the book intently, leaving it a full minute. But still there was nothing. "I don't understand. What is it I'm supposed to see?"

The double remained stubbornly silent. Ella turned to it, angered. "Tell me."

"As I said—there is nothing I can tell you that you don't already know." She paused, and then spoke solemnly, as if she was pronouncing some great revelation. "Everything you need is already inside you."

Ella slammed the book shut, irritated. "What pretentious nonsense."

"It's got to be a habit over the centuries, hasn't it? All your talk about demons, for instance, when really you meant love but you were too scared to say it..."

"You may be me," Ella said, "but if you continue to mock me I may find it necessary to kill you."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," the double said. She chuckled at her own joke. "Suicide would be a terrible waste of such a long life, especially when you have so much more to do."

Ella's smile faded. "Such as?"

"You have to take part in this war."

She nodded. "I know."

"Humanity needs you, Ella. Even if you profess not to need it."

"But I've failed so many times..." But even as she spoke the words, she realised she'd begun to accept what had happened, and her role in it. She was coming to terms with it, finding an inner peace that had eluded her for so long.

"...and that was just with Malachi. How do I go from that—to saving the entire world?"

"You'll work it out," the other Ella promised. She leaned forward and kissed Ella softly on the forehead. "I believe in you."

"Which means..."

"You've remembered how to believe in yourself."

Ella relaxed in the comforting assertion for a moment, but in a flash the spell was broken. Something began to scratch insistently at the back of her mind, as if there was something she was worried about but couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. The other Ella pulled back, as if she was feeling it too.

Ella felt her face twist itself into a replica of the one in front of her, her eyes widening, a frown corrugating her brow—

"Where are they?" they said in unison.

Suddenly, Ella's eyes snapped open. Darkness was beginning to fall around her, and as she looked around, she realised she was alone. No double, no Thelma, and no Leon.

She stretched over and grabbed the volta, wondering why they'd been gone so long, feeling a sickly sense of unease. Back at one with herself and her purpose in the world, she struck out into the gloom of the woods to search for them.


	5. Chapter 5

"We're lost," Thelma complained.

Leon glared at her. "We are not..."

He watched as she whirled around, skirt and wings flaring, an angelic vision in white that stood out starkly against the gathering gloom. "What _are_ you doing?"

"Trying to get my bearings." She stopped and wavered dizzily, narrowly avoiding teetering over. "Or not."

"This is all your fault," Leon decided, a little uncharitably since he'd made only a token protest about the idea of playing provider. It wasn't that he'd wanted to leave Ella, but his pride would never have let Thelma go it alone to try and speed her recovery. Ella hadn't protested much either, which was one hell of a turnaround: she was usually too stubborn to let him do anything that might have helped her.

He put the change down to the fact she'd almost died yesterday. Escaping death by the skin of your teeth—or in this case, the white hot point of a sacred knife—was a big deal for a human being who was going to die eventually anyway, let alone an anointed one with eternity ahead of them. Leon could tell the experience had changed her, but since they'd been too busy doing certain other things to talk about it, he wasn't sure exactly how, or what it might mean.

It didn't stop him hoping it might have something to do with him, though. If the End of Days had to begin, then the woman he loved more than anything else in the world actually returning those feelings would be the only good place for it to start.

"I mean, you were the one who dragged us out here in the first place..."

Thelma growled at him nonsensically.

"And now it's going dark, and we're completely lost."

"So you admit we're lost?"

He gritted his teeth. "Yes."

"Ha!"

" _Why_ did we not have the sense to leave some kind of trail..?"

"It's a bit late to worry about that now," Thelma retorted.

"What are we going to do?"

She sighed and folded her arms. "We could try shouting Ella."

"We could be miles away by now. She'll never hear us."

"Then it looks like we're on our own, doesn't it?"

"I suppose that's something we're going to have to get used to," Leon said, resigned to it. He waited for Thelma to regain her balance, and then carried on walking, straining in the near-darkness for any recognition that they were retracing the path they'd taken.

"You mean after this, don't you?"

"When we get back out there, yeah."

Thelma was silent for a second. "Where are we going to go?"

"We'll think of something," Leon said. He was trying for positive, but the strain was starting to show, and it sounded false, even to him.

"Such as?"

"I know a few places."

"I'm looking for specifics, Leon."

He shrugged lightly. "Well, there's this tattoo place in town. That might be a good bet—everyone's probably got one already by now."

"It's not funny, Leon!"

"Actually," he said, thinking about it, "that's not such a bad idea."

His heart skipped as branches rustled behind him. In the velvety darkness it was easy to imagine there was something prowling behind every tree, waiting to attack them, and every sudden noise made it seem more likely. But when he turned around there was only Thelma, colliding with a trunk. She wagged a disapproving finger at it, righted herself, and skipped to catch up with him.

"Say what?"

"No, seriously. If Malachi's got the whole of Medenham under his spell, they're going to be on the lookout for anyone who isn't."

"So you want us to get tattoos so we fit in?"

"Not permanent ones..."

"What next? Wigs and funny hats?"

He looked over in her direction. "It's another option, isn't it?"

"I'm getting worried about you," Thelma said, sounding more grumpy than concerned.

"Oh yeah?"

"Let's put it this way: the world must be in some serious shit if you're coping with the end of it better than a ghost and an anointed one."

He laughed, but there was no humour in it. "What good is it going to do us if we start falling apart?"

"Just because you're a man doesn't mean you have to act like one," Thelma said archly.

"I'm not acting like anything—" He stopped and frowned, her earlier words suddenly sinking in. "Hang on, you said—what makes you think Ella's not coping with it?"

Thelma sighed. " _Men_."

"I might not be a lesbian, or a ghost, or an anointed one, but that doesn't mean you have to insult me every five seconds."

"Men have absolutely no intuition," Thelma concluded. "That is not an insult, that is scientific fact."

Leon thought back. "I know the book being blank knocked her for six..."

"It's more than that, Leon. You heard what she was saying about the Nephilim."

"She was upset. You're reading too much into it."

"You're not reading enough into it."

"I tell you what," Leon said, irked, "when we get back, we'll ask Ella, shall we?"

"Fine. But I'm telling you—she's more weirded out by this than she's letting on."

"Well, I suppose that's understandable. I mean, this is as new to her as it is to us." He stuck his hands in his pockets, considering it for the first time. "You don't think she's blaming herself for it, do you?"

"Maybe. I mean, it was her job to stop Malachi, and she didn't."

"Oh, say it like it is, won't you?"

"I always do," Thelma reminded him proudly.

"If you're going to play the blame game," Leon argued, "then you should be blaming us as well."

"Well, I know where I went wrong, but why you? I mean, if I hadn't gone and blabbed to Malachi, he would have knocked back that Scotch and you would have gutted him there and then."

"Would I?" He sighed, knowing it was something he would always wonder about. He'd proven totally incapable of administering the fatal blow to Alex, but then that was different. She was a friend—a victim. She hadn't deserved to die. Malachi, on the other hand, was an arrogant twat who'd stolen Ella away from him not because he really loved or valued her, but because he could. When he thought of it like that, Leon decided he might have found it easy to kill him.

But then it wasn't just Malachi's fault. He hadn't bewitched Ella until much later. She'd fancied him, and she'd wanted to be with him more than she'd wanted to be with Leon. If he tried to use their relationship as an excuse for murder then he might as well have gone and stuck the knife into Ella too, and miserable as the whole experience had made him, that really would have been insane—just the kind of insane thing he'd done when he'd been under Malachi's malign influence, in fact. Or so Ella and Thelma had said.

There were just so many variables, and so many things that bothered him about all of them. That he might really have been able to justify murdering Malachi on the grounds that he'd nicked his girlfriend. That he couldn't just have done it because Malachi was the future architect of the End of Days. What kind of selfish wanker needed an incentive to do something for the greater good, when the fact it was for the greater good should have been all he needed?

What bothered him most of all though was the knowledge that he probably would have wimped out right at the last minute, as he'd done with Alex—and yet he'd chopped off the head of his own best friend without a second thought. His memories of killing Tom were equally as hazy as the ones of torturing Ella, but he knew this much: he hadn't hesitated to do it.

It was one weird world when you had to behead your best mate to impress a girl. And the fact that he had—well, it might have been a measure of how much he loved Ella, but maybe it was a measure of something else, too. It didn't really matter whether he would have killed Malachi or not, because he'd proved perfectly capable of killing Tom. Leon wasn't sure he wanted to know how much more he might be capable of—but he had a horrible feeling that, sooner or later, he was going to find out. There was no way he could feel optimistic about that, whatever Thelma thought.

But he'd be damned if he wasn't going to try. It was either that or blub like a baby.

"Thelma," he began hesitantly.

"Yeah?"

"How do we know we're not blowing this out of all proportion?"

"Leon, we're lost. End of."

"The End of Days."

He caught a glimmer of a frown on her face. "How do you mean?"

"Well, we've been assuming we're going to go out there and find the whole world's gone to hell..."

"Steady on," Thelma said. "I don't think him upstairs is going to let them win _that_ easily."

"So Malachi burned down the school. And I get that he's somehow started a war by doing it, but what I don't get is why anything's going to be any different. I mean, even in World War Two people were just carrying on as normal. Who's to say that's not what's happening now?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You're not Leon Taylor. You're some kind of happy clappy pod person."

"Seriously. Why not?"

"Because this _isn't_ World War Two. This is bigger than that. Like—biblical bigger."

He felt a last spark of positive thinking firmly extinguished. "Meaning it's automatically got to be raining fire and thunderbolts?"

"More like normal rain, just lots of it," Thelma said instantly, as if she'd thought about it before. "We should probably chop down a few trees and build an ark, just in case."

Leon frowned. "Yeah, right."

"This is not going to be pretty, Leon. It's pretty crappy already, in fact."

His eyes strayed ahead of him into the half-light. "So what do you think it's going to be like?"

"Honestly? I don't know."

"Then make an educated guess."

There was a long pause before she replied, as if she was gathering her thoughts. He wasn't sure if it meant she was censoring them for his benefit, or making sure she painted as gruesome a picture as possible.

"Jez was really keen on teaching all kinds of martial arts. I think he did that for a reason: to build an army. And I think Malachi's going to send that army out into the streets to corrupt people for him and kill them if they resist, while he hides behind closed doors getting off on it all."

"What about the other side?" Leon said slowly.

"Trying to repair all the damage. Probably by killing as many of Malachi's followers as they can and converting anyone who's left to the way of the Samurai."

"Huh?"

Thelma coughed. "Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Way of the Lord. I meant the way of the _Lord_..."

"Why would they convert people?"

"That's what made Roxanne immune to him, remember?"

Leon nodded. "Right."

"Not forgetting all the other weirdness that'll be happening while they're busy battling it out. Thunderstorms, torrential rain, animals going crazy, random Nephilims popping out from behind every street corner...you know the sort of thing. Just your average every day apocalypse."

He stared at her, astounded by the detail. "You really have thought this through, haven't you?"

"What else did you think I was doing last night while you and Ella were snoozing? Which did make a nice change from the groping, by the way..."

"Do you think we're going to have to kill anyone?"

And there it was. But as soon as he said it he realised how lame it sounded. It was stupid to seek a reassurance he knew he wasn't going to get, just like it had been stupid to try to persuade himself that, when they eventually walked out of here, it wasn't going to be all death and destruction, chaos and carnage.

Because of course it was.

"I think we're all going to have to do things we don't like," Thelma said tentatively. "And that probably includes killing people, yes."

Leon nodded. "Great."

"Oh, Leon..."

"I guess I'll just have to get used to it, won't I?"

"You're still cut up about Tom."

It was a statement, not a question. Leon shot her a glare, annoyed as much by his own transparency as the unfortunate choice of words.

"And I understand that," Thelma said sympathetically, "really, I do. But if Malachi finds out we're trying to stop him being crowned king of the world, he's not going to give us a royal pardon. He'll just send his mob to slice and dice us."

"Meaning..?"

"That it's kill or be killed," she said, brutally honest as always.

"That makes us as bad as them," Leon argued.

"No, it doesn't, because the difference is that they're not going to worry about it afterwards. And if you want to survive this, Leon, you can't afford to worry about it, either. At least...not much."

He stared at her, and for the first time he understood something. He'd accused Ella of being heartless, but it was only now he realised she'd had to become that way to protect herself from the consequences of killing people day in, day out for five hundred years.

All the same, it wasn't something he wanted for himself. If this war was going to turn him into some kind of killer—well, that was how it would have to be. But he wasn't about to close off his heart to do it, desire to be Ella's equal or not. If feeling the pain meant he could still feel, then that was the way he wanted it to stay.

"It's them or us," Thelma insisted. "And I know who I'd rather see joining me on the other side."

"You're not _on_ the other side," he pointed out.

"I will be if— _when—_ we get the result we want. Dead Malachi equals disappearing Thelma. There's no getting around that."

"I suppose not."

She smiled sadly, looking haunted—which, for a ghost, was quite some feat—but then tried to disguise it with a carefree shrug. "I told you we'd all have to do things we didn't like. I guess that's going to be mine."

It was a subject that was just too serious, and one Leon wanted to think about almost as little as he wanted to think about cutting a bloody swathe through the streets of Medenham. So he grinned, trying to lighten the mood.

"Not planning on sabotaging us again, are you?"

"If stopping that curly haired bastard stomping his size nines all over the world means I have to disappear," Thelma said with grim determination, "then so be it."

"Just when I was getting used to having you around."

"Oh, I'll find some way of haunting you, don't you worry. And I'll be watching. _All_ the time."

Leon shuddered. "God, I hope not."

"Just think," Thelma said gleefully. "You may never have sex again."

They strolled along in companionable silence for a while, trailing past tree after tree, the shadows hiding their wounds.

"I was just wondering," Leon said, eventually.

"About the haunting thing? Or about the killing thing?"

He paused. "If there was any hope."

"There's _always_ hope. Malachi can take everything else away from us, but he can't..."

Leon waited for the rest, but it didn't come. Thelma's voice had faded into oblivion, as if a power cut had killed the TV right when someone was in the middle of a sentence. The silence of the woods was almost deafening. He stopped, confused, wondering for a second if Malachi had tripped and fallen on a knife or something.

"Thelma?" He glanced around him, but saw nothing except the spiky outlines of trees, looming menacingly out of the darkness. Suddenly the woods seemed nothing like the safe haven he'd thought them earlier. "Thelma, this is not a good time to be playing hide and seek!"

A twig snapped behind him. He spun around, but saw nothing. He stepped forward cautiously, his heart thumping in his chest. "Thelma?"

"I'm here," Thelma said from behind him, making him jump. He turned around again.

"For God's sake, Thelma!"

"What?"

"Where did you disappear to?"

Thelma beckoned him to follow her and pushed through some foliage dangling from between two trees. Leon pursued her, and as soon as he reached the other side realised what it was that had caught her eye. In the clearing in front of them was the unmistakeable sight of a building. Some kind of wooden shack, if his eyes weren't playing more tricks on him.

"Ta da!" Thelma said triumphantly. "Saw it out of the corner of my eye. It must be where the scouts hang out."

Leon rolled his eyes in frustration. "We didn't pass this earlier. We're just getting further and further away from where we started."

"Don't be so miserable. There's bound to be stuff in here we can use."

"Such as?"

"Survival gear. Camping supplies. Food, maybe."

She rubbed her hands together in glee and skipped off towards the hut as Leon followed reluctantly.

"You've never seen 'The Blair Witch Project', have you?" he said as she began to work on the padlock on the door with practised ease, using the edge of a branch as a lock pick.

"Of course I have." Thelma flashed him an evil grin as the lock snapped open and took hold of the door. "You don't seriously think we're going to find someone hanging in the corner in here, do you?"

"No," Leon said. It sounded less than convincing, even to him.

"Trust me. There's only one witch in these woods, and she's on our team."

Eyeing up the enormous silken cobwebs that were strung across the roof, Leon decided that witches were the least of their worries. He wasn't keen on marching straight into a dark enclosed space with God knows how many freaks of nature lurking inside to grab him, and so he hung back warily as Thelma prised careful fingers around the splintered doorframe.

The door swung open with a creak, sending what little daylight there was left lapping hungrily into the darkened interior of the cabin. Thelma looked at him expectantly.

"Oh no," he said with a smirk. "I'm acting like a man, remember? And you know what we men are supposed to say—" He held the door open for her and gestured for her to enter. "Ladies first."

Thelma muttered something uncomplimentary under her breath and stepped inside cautiously. Growing braver, she disappeared further inside and began hunting around like a woman possessed. After a while she jumped up, a wide smile on her face.

"Tins! I found tins!"

"Let's see," Leon said. Forgetting his fears, he stepped forward, clumsily colliding with the doorframe on his way in. The cabin rocked for a second—and then Thelma screamed as a voluminous shape floated down from the corner and enveloped her. As she wrestled with it, Leon grabbed a branch from the forest floor and dived over to beat it off. Only then did he realise that it wasn't exactly what it seemed.

"Thelma, stop—Thelma—it's just a blanket, Thelma!"

Thelma stopped struggling and pulled it off her, hurling it aside. "I thought it was a bloody Nephilim."

"So did I," he admitted, his heart still racing.

"Thank God for that," Thelma said, looking disgruntled. She scowled as Leon started to laugh, then snatched a tin cup off a shelf and threw it at him. He took it square in the chest, but it just made him laugh even harder.

"It's not FUNNY!"

"I know," he spluttered, "but—you were attacked by a _blanket—_ "

Thelma regarded him stony faced for a second and then burst out laughing as well. It was a good sound; a good feeling. A day of built up tension melted away as their laughter rippled into the still air.

"Don't you think this is all a bit too convenient?" Leon asked, once he could finally keep a straight face again.

"I told you the scouts went camping in the summer." She looked around and sighed. "School's out now. They were probably planning to set off today."

"I wonder what happened to them."

Thelma smiled crookedly. "Got delayed by the end of the world?"

"Let's just collect some of this stuff and get going," Leon said, trying to shake off the feeling that he was stealing from the dead. It wasn't quite as dramatic as being attacked by a shadowy predator, but it tore at his heart just the same. They'd set out to find food—but every step they'd taken had brought them closer to something far more important.

It wasn't just about coming to terms with what had happened, although he thought that he finally had. Or about realising that things were never going to be the same, because he'd already accepted that. Their world had grown so small in the last twenty-four hours that all they'd begun to care about was how they felt, what they were going to do, how this war was going to affect them. They'd paid lip service to the rest, but until now it had just been words.

It wasn't just about them. And it had taken this crazy, eventless journey into nowhere to make them realise it.

Thelma forced her eyes away from the neat pile of tents in the corner and kicked the offending blanket towards him. "Wrap them up in that."

"At least you'll get something to eat now."

"It wasn't _for_ me," Thelma said plaintively. "It was for Ella."

"We'll find our way back," Leon promised.

"It's afterwards that's worrying me. I mean, how can we fight the End of Days when we can't even go for a wander in the woods without getting lost?.."

She caught the twinkle in Leon's eye and started chuckling about it. He grinned back and tossed one of the tins over to her. She caught it smartly, tossed it around so she could see the label and then hugged it to her.

"Beans and sausages! Now I can die happy."

"You're already dead," Leon said, exasperated, but no sooner had he got the words out than the ground shook violently underneath him. He ducked and covered his head as camping equipment clattered off the shelves and bounced off him and onto the floor. Thelma screeched in protest as the cabin lurched, sending a shower of tent pegs raining down on her.

The rumbling continued for what seemed like an hour, and then, as suddenly as it had started, everything was still again.

Leon stood up gingerly, rubbing the back of his head. "What the _hell_ was that?"

"Well," Thelma said as she clung onto a shelf cautiously, "you know what I was saying about unnatural things happening..."

"Yeah..."

He was thrown off his feet again by another tremor and landed with a thud on the floor.

"Bloody big earthquakes," Thelma barked over the rumbling, "are natural in California, not in England!"

"Better get out of here before the whole thing collapses on us," Leon yelled as the log walls squealed and scraped against the tremors. He rolled away just in time from a tent pole that was trying to impale him, grabbed his blanket-wrapped bundle and ran hell for leather out of the door, hearing Thelma's urgent footsteps following him.

"Jesus," Thelma groaned as the world continued to shake. She extended a hand towards a tree to steady herself but then snatched it back again with a shudder. "I feel seasick."

"Is this it? Is it starting?"

She stared around the woods as if she was seeing them for the first time. "More like...starting to sink in."

"Yeah," Leon said with a brief glance down to check the soil hadn't turned to quicksand when he wasn't paying attention. "Well, let's go and find Ella before that happens, shall we?"

As they went to walk away, a crashing sound behind them stopped them in their strides, making them both jump. Leon turned around and watched open-mouthed as the cabin collapsed in on itself like a house of cards, logs crashing to the ground in a cloud of dust and chippings. He looked across at Thelma, who was staring at the demolition job with fascination, apparently not concerned that they'd been standing in the cabin only seconds before.

"Cool," she said admiringly.

Leon silently wondered what else could go wrong today. Then, as if on cue, he felt something tap him on the shoulder. Something thin and bony. Almost like...a finger.

His eyes widened with panic, but, struggling to reign it in, he turned around slowly. If he had to die, and it had to be today of all days, the least he could do was stare it in the face first.

"Did you feel the earth move?" Ella asked saucily.

He broke into a wide smile, wondering for a second if he was hallucinating. But when he pulled her towards him and held her tightly, feeling her heart beating in time with his own, he knew it was real.

"What are _you_ doing here?" Thelma gasped as she came over to them.

Ella handed her the volta and draped her arms around Leon's neck. "I got bored."

"We got lost," Thelma said as if it was a contest.

Ella turned serious again. "I was really worried about you."

"How did you find us?" Leon asked. He was a little bewildered by her sudden appearance, more so by how different she seemed. The last time he'd seen her she'd been lying listlessly against the tree trunk, weakened by the stab wound and despairing over the loss of the book. But now there was fire in her eyes again. She seemed full of energy and life, as if she'd been restored somehow.

"It's what I do, remember?"

Leon raised an eyebrow at her, waiting for more, for the secret ingredient to her success. Okay, so she tracked down her prey for a living. But his pride was more than a little wounded by the fact it had taken him and Thelma all day to get themselves lost and Ella less than half of that to find them. There had to be more to it than that.

"I followed your footsteps," she admitted.

He opened his mouth to grumble about the fact that, as far as he and Thelma's untrained eyes could see, they hadn't left any footsteps to follow in. But one of Ella's hands was wandering slowly down his back and by the time she slipped it underneath his t-shirt, he'd completely forgotten what it was he'd been about to say.

"At least you didn't sniff him out," Thelma said with obvious distaste.

"But you didn't get lost," Leon pressed.

"Actually...I did go a bit off course there for a while."

She bit her lip and looked up at him uncertainly. He stared into her eyes, knowing exactly what she meant without her having to say it.

"Yeah," he said, smoothing down a wisp of her hair. "So did we."


	6. Chapter 6

It was late into the evening by the time they returned to base camp, got a fire going, and settled down to eat the proceeds of Thelma and Leon's raid on the scout hut. It was almost homely: the closest thing they had to a home at the moment, anyway. It would have been easy to believe that they were camping out for the fun, and not because they'd been forced into it. Even the inky blackness that surrounded them like a shroud couldn't taint the sense of contentment that had somehow settled upon them.

On another day the flames that flickered not five feet away might have triggered unhappy memories for Ella, but, protected by Leon's arms, they just made her feel safe and warm. She glanced up as thunder rolled ominously in the distance, reminding her not to get _too_ comfortable.

"Storm's brewing," Thelma observed.

Ella nodded. "I think it's almost time for us to move on."

"We only came here in the first place," Thelma reminded her, "because you were dead on your feet and Leon couldn't carry you any further."

"Well, now I've healed."

"When you've got to go," Leon said reflectively, "you've got to go."

"We'll leave at first light," Ella decided.

Thelma frowned. "And do what? Okay, so we're better fed than we were this morning. But apart from that we're right back where we started."

"Not necessarily," Ella said. She disentangled herself from Leon and pulled the book of Orokiah towards her, laying it flat on the floor and opening it at its centre pages. Thelma scurried across to take a look.

"What do you see?"

"It's still blank," Leon said slowly.

"I know."

Thelma glanced at Leon, apparently thinking she'd taken leave of her senses. But to Ella, at long last, it made perfect sense. She'd been wracking her brains on the long walk through the woods, trying to work out what it was she was supposed to be divining from the empty pages of the book. It wasn't until Leon and Thelma had told her about the odd marks they'd discovered that it had all finally clicked.

"You told me you saw something on the trees," Ella persisted.

"Some kind of symbol," Leon confirmed.

"Exactly."

"I don't understand what this has got to do with the book," Thelma said, looking confused.

"Because the book is a symbol too."

"Pretty meaningless one, if you ask me."

"On the contrary." She jabbed a finger at the empty pages. "What do you see when you see a blank page before you? An empty well, dry of hope? Or...a clean slate?"

"Is this like a glass half full thing?" Thelma asked, sounding dubious.

"We don't need it," Leon said, catching on.

"Precisely."

Thelma snorted. "Come on, you guys. Positive thinking is nice and New Age-y and all, but it's not going to help us."

"But lateral thinking is," Ella said. "That's what we're going to need if we're going to defeat Malachi. And that's what the book is trying to tell us."

Thelma still seemed sceptical. "They wiped it because they're trying to help?"

"I'm not even sure if it _was_ deliberate, and if it wasn't, what their motives might have been. Maybe it was just a side effect of the End of Days, like the tremors and the thunder—I don't know. But I do know the world is a very different place now, and that means we need to find a different way of dealing with it. New ideas, a new approach..."

She looked over at Leon. "A new guide."

"Mephistopheles," he said.

"He does seem to know an awful lot about the End of Days," she conceded, a little stiffly. It was kind of hard on the pride to admit that you might have been too quick to dismiss a good idea just because it hadn't come from you, even if you only admitted it to yourself. As the other Ella had pointed out, Leon and Thelma knew as much and as little about the End of Days as she did. Their opinions were equally as valid as hers, five hundred years of experience or not. It was long past time she stopped listening only to herself, and started opening an ear to them.

"He's _evil_!" Thelma protested.

"But a sophisticated type of evil. The old-fashioned kind, one that admires honour and integrity. Malachi is none of those things."

Leon smiled, a touch triumphant. "There's your 'why'."

"What I can't work out," Ella said with a sly smile of her own, "is why he seems to have taken such a liking to you."

He grinned and clasped his hands behind his head, the picture of confidence. "Because I'm irresistible."

"Oh, are you now?"

"Come here and let's find out."

He made a playful grab for her. Mindful of her double's warning—her own warning—about being too serious, she let herself be caught.

"Oh God," Thelma said as they giggled, hands flying to her head in despair, "you're going to get yourselves killed. I just know you are."

Leon looked over at her, concerned, but she lifted her head and shrugged, willing to run with it. "I guess I've been outvoted on this one, haven't I?"

"It's not like that," Ella said.

"The hell it isn't," she retorted, but there was a smile playing on her lips. "You know, three really is a bastard of a number sometimes."

"We'll have to go looking for some more ghosts then," Leon joked.

Ella tilted her head to one side in thought. "Maybe not ghosts...but we do need allies."

"Yeah," Thelma agreed. "Anyone without a tattoo on their neck will do nicely."

"David Tyrel."

"What about him?"

"Did you never wonder why Malachi was unable to corrupt him, like he did everyone else?"

Thelma shrugged. "Like the boy wonder himself said—he's not Jim'll Fix It."

"There has to be more to it than that," Ella said, adamant. "And it's not just that he wanted Jo in charge of the school. If David had been an incubus, he would have let them do whatever they wanted. But instead they had to use more conventional means to get him out of the way."

"Are you saying he's immune to them somehow?" asked Leon.

"Not in a religious sense, like Roxanne. There's something else about him. And we need to find out what that something is."

"Well, we're going to have to find him first," he said.

Thelma frowned. "Last seen or heard of down at Medenham nick, if I remember correctly."

"Then it's settled. First order of the day: we track down Mephistopheles, and we look for David." She looked at Thelma and Leon, an eyebrow raised. "Agreed?"

"What's this I see before me," Thelma said in disbelief, "Ella Dee working by committee? Consulting other people? Actually caring what they think?.."

"I'm asking for your agreement," Ella said, "not your approval."

She saw Leon frowning, realised it had sounded harsh, and sought an appropriate word to tag on the end. Thelma wasn't just one of the troops, after all. She was a friend.

"Please."

Thelma's lips curled wickedly. "You know, I think I like you better this way."

"We do have the advantage of surprise," Ella continued, intent on laying out the battle plans. "Malachi must believe we're dead, or no longer a threat, or he would have come in search of us by now."

Leon nodded. "Or maybe he's doing the same thing we're doing. Trying to work out what to do next."

"Maybe. He has a war to win, after all."

"You think he's got any regrets?"

Ella thought back to her brief infatuation with Malachi. When they'd first met she'd thought him a mirror of herself: stuck at the same age, struggling with the same conflict between their destinies and desires. She'd thought he felt it too. Even when he could see nothing, he'd somehow found his way to her, as if they were linked by an invisible thread.

But it had all been a lie. Another twisted scheme to render her powerless, another brainchild of Azazeal's, perhaps. He was the one who'd put it in motion, turning intrigue and attraction into unstoppable passion, and all by suggesting that Malachi might be her perfect fit. She hadn't even known it was something she was searching for, but he had. It had probably amused him no end, when the word got back to whichever circle of hell he inhabited, that she'd fallen for his schemes—and for his son—hook, line and sinker.

Malachi might have been half-human, but so far there had been little evidence that he'd inherited anything from his mother except for her powers. He certainly hadn't received her heart. Whatever it was he was doing today, Ella was quite sure it didn't involve a shred of repentance.

"No," she said.

Thelma sniggered nervously. "Shame. This would be a hell of a lot easier if he'd get an attack of the guilts."

"Yeah," Leon agreed. "We could just give him the knife and ask him to stab himself for us."

"Unfortunately," Ella said, "it's not going to be that simple."

There was a long silence as each of them absorbed the enormity of the task ahead of them. Finally, Thelma broke it, standing up and shaking the soil from her skirt.

"Right. I'm going for a walk."

Leon exchanged a glance with Ella. "You sure that's a good idea?"

"Got to walk off my dinner, haven't I?"

"But you're a ghost," he said, looking bewildered.

"A ghost who is not planning on getting lost again." She knocked two of the empty tins together. "Pity we didn't find some string. I could have made us a mobile phone."

"Maybe we should all go," Leon began, but Thelma clanged the tins loudly to interrupt.

"I'll see you later," she said robustly. " _Much_ later. A _lot_ later in fact. So feel free to, you know, do whatever you feel like doing while I'm gone. Sharpen the old knife. Burn the book. Play 'I Spy'. You know. Whatever."

A rustle of ghostly footsteps later, she'd disappeared into the darkness, leaving no room for further debate. They glanced at each other, amused.

"I think," Ella said with an eyebrow raised, "that was Thelma's way of giving us some privacy."

"Or her way of saying we're pissing her off," Leon suggested.

"But either way, I think we should take advantage of it."

Eyes sparkling, he lifted her chin with a finger and bent towards her to kiss her. She parted her lips, but suddenly he backed away, breaking the spell.

"I don't know," he said, looking doubtful. "It seems kind of selfish. With everything that's happening out there..."

Ella took a moment to appreciate how much he cared about their cause—if not his timing. "That's very noble of you, Leon," she said, with more patience than she felt. "But it's entirely misplaced. You acting like a monk is not going to help them right now."

He smiled sheepishly. "I guess not."

"Tomorrow we concentrate on saving the world," she promised. "But for tonight..."

She gripped his t-shirt and guided him towards her until their lips met. As the kiss deepened, she slowly pushed him to the floor, melting into him until she could no longer remember where he ended and she began. His hand drifted from her head down to the nape of her neck and beyond, sending a delicious tingle down her spine.

And then it stopped. Feeling him pull away again, she sat up, frustrated.

"Is something wrong?"

"Turn around," he said, in a low voice.

Ella frowned but obeyed, wondering if it was the corset that was bothering him or if he was giving her a taste of her own medicine by toying with her feelings, the way she'd toyed with his. She turned her head curiously and saw him peering just below her shoulder, his face pensive in the soft orange glow of the firelight.

"Your scar."

She filled in the gaps mentally: the scar she'd received back when she'd been tried as a witch. "What about it?"

Leon slipped her shirt down her shoulder to reveal the scar and traced it with careful fingers. "It's the same as the marks on the trees."

"That's because they're not marks," Ella said, shifting back around to face him. It had been too dark to make a thorough inspection of what had disturbed him and Thelma so much. But she had already guessed it would be something like this. "They're brands."

"Of evil."

"Yes," she confirmed softly. "Of evil."

He shook his head, exhaling slowly. "I thought as much. It was creepy enough back there, but on you—"

"It was a long time ago, Leon."

"I know."

"Then what's the problem?"

He sought out her hand and, grasping it gently, said, "It just seems really close to home right now."

She nodded and let it linger, basking for a moment in the warmth of the fire, the heat of his skin against hers.

"Every time I think it's sinking in," Leon continued, "it hits me. This is really it. The End of Days."

"The End of Days," she echoed, and then frowned. "It was Mephistopheles who told you that name."

He looked confused. "Yeah."

"And what it would mean."

"Ella, we've already been over this."

"So why did you come back?"

He broke into a wide grin, happy to joke about it now that particular danger was over. "So we could play doctors and nurses?"

"But he told you what was going to happen. He told you there was no point in fighting this war. So why did you not run as fast and as far away from it as you could?"

"Because he also told me there was one thing worth fighting for." Leon paused and looked straight at her. "Love."

Ella choked back a wave of emotion, caught off guard by what she saw in his eyes. They were eyes that had seen far more of the dark underbelly of the world than they should have done, and they'd lost some of their innocence because of it. But the boyish enthusiasm still remained, and beyond it, the love.

Despite everything that had happened, all the awful things she'd said and done to him, he'd never stopped fighting for her. It was only now that she fully understood why.

"Leon," she began. "About yesterday—"

He looked rueful. "I was upset about Tom. I didn't mean it."

"Oh, yes you did. But that wasn't what I meant either."

"Oh."

"You said I'd forgotten what love is, and you were right. I had. But—" She paused, delicately. "I think I remembered."

"How come?" he said carefully, not rushing her. This was new ground, and neither of them wanted to be the one to spoil it.

"You reminded me."

He leaned back on his one free hand to take it in, looking a little stunned. "So er, when—when was this?"

"Yesterday. When I thought I was dying. And today, too. When I was talking to myself."

The idea obviously tickling him, he laughed out loud. "Ella, just how much blood did you lose exactly?"

"I don't know if it was a dream, or some kind of hallucination, or if it really did happen," she said, all seriousness. She could always have kept the experience to herself, attempted to rationalise it in secret. But that wasn't part of the deal anymore. "But somehow, I _was_ talking to myself."

"Thelma reckons the world's out of balance because of the End of Days," Leon said thoughtfully. "And with your powers, maybe—"

"I was out of balance long before the End of Days."

"What, literally?"

"Apparently so."

"But now you're not?"

She shook her head.

"I guess...that's okay then," he said, in the slow manner he had when he was taking something in that was particularly strange or supernatural, as if his brain was still catching up with his mouth.

She looked over at him, wondering if he thought she'd gone crazy again. But he was perfectly serious. It seemed like he was taking it in his stride.

"Doesn't that surprise you?"

"Ella," he said, grinning, "I can see dead people, my girlfriend is a witch, and it turned out the end of term was actually the end of the world. _Nothing_ surprises me anymore."

She smiled. "I tried to tell you something yesterday, Leon. But you didn't believe me. Do you think you'll believe me if I tell you it now?"

"Depends what it is," he said teasingly.

"I—" She closed her eyes, cursing herself for her cowardice. He'd given her so much. The least she could do was let him know exactly where he stood with her, if she could only bring herself to say it. "I—"

But then she heard the nagging little voice again, the one in the back of her head. _Go on_ , it said, encouraging her, almost daring her. _Go on go on go on go on..._

"I love you."

_See? That wasn't so hard, was it?_

Leon didn't say anything. Instead he just stared at her in wonder. She smiled at him, hardly able to believe she'd actually said it, and he smiled back. Ella's heart was thumping; she felt giddy, almost light-headed, more vulnerable than when she'd been mortally wounded even. But with it came a strength she'd never expected.

Love was no longer the enemy. It was no longer a weakness. She could love, and be loved—and it had made her whole again.

She felt a sudden burst of confidence that the war that was coming was one she— _they—_ would be able to win. Surely defeating Malachi would be as of nothing compared to defeating her own demons.

_There goes the D word again..._

"Oh shut up," she muttered. Leon frowned.

"I didn't say anything."

"No," she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck and moved closer, seeing fire dancing in his eyes, a fire she knew was reflected in hers. "So you'd better make it quick. Because by the time I've finished with you, you won't be able to."

"I love..."

"Not quick enough," she murmured, leaning in to silence him with a passionate kiss as they fell to the floor beside the leaping flames.

The fire had burned out by the time they finished making love.


	7. Chapter 7

Thelma thought it strangely appropriate that the sky should be red this morning. She couldn't remember the exact wording, but she did remember the rhyme: red sky in the morning equalled a warning. And there it was, up over her head.

A sky as red as a river of blood.

She was standing on the outskirts of the woods, watching the sunrise. It was the first time she'd been outside of her tree-lined sanctuary in over a day, and it had given her a brief surge of surprise to realise that the sun was still rising and setting, as if nothing had ever happened. But even if she'd been emerging from a long coma with no knowledge of the events of the last twenty-four hours, Thelma thought things would still have seemed different.

Even in the early morning light, a haze of grey smoke obscured the green and pleasant landscape. The air was unusually cool for summer, and thick with foreboding. Tremors rippled underfoot every so often, but apart from that nothing moved. Everything was just so, so still. It was as if the world was holding its breath, and waiting.

She'd had the best of intentions in upping and leaving. Ella and Leon were obviously gagging for it, and it was nothing she hadn't seen before, even if she had felt like watching. Thelma might have been doomed to an eternity of celibacy, but it was only fair to let them make the most of the brief lull in action—so to speak. Of course, for all she knew, they really had spent all night playing 'I Spy': but somehow she doubted it.

Naked 'Twister' was probably closer to it.

But it wasn't really because of them that she'd cut and run in the first place, although she had no intention of telling them that; she had yet to name her price for giving them some time alone together, but bangers for a, well, bang, did seem a pretty fair exchange.

It was because of her.

It was when they'd been joking about Malachi killing himself for them that Thelma had felt the strangest need to be on her own for a while, so she could consider everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen. She'd needed to cry about it, to rail against it—to reflect on it—while she still could.

Because it would be action, not introspection, that would determine who won this war. There would be no time for soul-searching during the End of Days, so it had to be done now, during this odd midpoint between the start of the war and the beginning of the battle. But the precious hours of calm had been running down like sand through an hourglass, and now they were nearly gone.

Yet another strangeness, in a world that was full of them: now that the storm that had been gathering far off the horizon was almost upon them, Thelma felt the calmest she ever had.

Soon she would have to wake Ella and Leon, and then they would leave limbo, and the woods, behind for good. But for now, she would stay here, and enjoy the last moments of a peace that might never come again.

Like Malachi had done before her, as Azazeal had done before him, Thelma stood under the shade of an ancient tree, and watched.

And waited.

And then, as thunder clapped loudly in the distance, she walked away and did something neither of them had ever done, or ever could do. The one thing that just might make the difference in the battle that was about to engulf them all.

She went to fetch her friends.


End file.
